The Once and Future China

By Jonathan D. Spence, Foreign Policy,
January\February 2005

What of China's past could be a harbinger for its future?

Despite its incredible pace of change, China continues to carry echoes
of its past. And yet, the difficulty of drawing any direct links
between its past and present is demonstrated by the fact that any
topic can shift in perspective depending on where you enter
China's vast chronology. What constitutes political stability, for
example, has varied dramatically across almost four millennia, and in
different periods it has been defined in relation to the greatness of
leaders, the peacefulness of imperial successions, the suppression of
peasant rebellions, and the handling of foreign
incursions—whether religions, technologies, or troops.

Our appreciation of China's economic growth will veer erratically,
depending on whether we concentrate on specie and banking, the
formation of cities, the creation of trade hubs, or advances in
transportation and communication. Our current fascination with
high-tech dynamism could be tied to an equally wide range of variants,
designed to give China an aura of either preeminence or
stagnation. Rarely has China been so weak as when the emperor's
ill-equipped army did battle with British forces during the Opium Wars
in the mid-19th century. And yet, the sophistication of the Song
dynasty's metallurgy or the imposing power of the Ming
dynasty's fleets made China a potential global leader long before
the competition among states was considered in these terms.

But today, relations among states are discussed very much like a
competition or race, and few have run it as well as China in the
modern era. Indeed, the prospect of China's rise has become a
source of endless speculation and debate. To speak of China's
rise is to suggest its reemergence. It can also imply a
recovery from some kind of slump or period of quietude. But
rise can also mean that a change is being made at someone
else's expense. Must a fall always accompany a rise? If so, then a
conflict will occur almost by definition. These are difficult
questions made all the more so by the fact that a country as vast and
complex as China makes up at least half of the equation.

One arena, however, in which China's past can serve as a useful
prologue to the present, can be found in looking at how its
territorial extent has evolved over time. This approach can show both
how China has come to be the size it is, and perhaps—although
this is a more contentious area—how China might change again in
the future.

The China of today can be recognizably traced back to the late 16th
century and the waning years of the Ming dynasty. One harbinger of
what was to come was China's earlier Korean War—in 1592. It
was then that the wildly ambitious Japanese military commander
Hideyoshi sent a powerful fleet and ground forces to invade Korea,
hoping to consume the country and force a passage into China, the
greatest prize of all. Despite the ineptitude and factionalism of the
Ming court, the Chinese responded powerfully, sending a strong
expeditionary force to check the Japanese advance and shore up the
Korean king. They ordered major fleets from south China to sail north
with reinforcements and supplies, and to interdict the Japanese supply
routes. After numerous costly engagements on land and sea, and vast
numbers of both civilian and military casualties, the Sino-Korean
forces prevailed, and in late 1598, the Japanese withdrew.

So did the Chinese, and that was one important marker for the future:
China itself would not try to conquer Korea, but China would react
against another power if it interfered in the Korean peninsula, even
at great cost. Such interventions by China occurred a second time in
the face of renewed Japanese aggression in 1894, and once again in the
face of the presumed threat of the U.N. forces sent to check the North
Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950. Few probably realize that
China's current diplomatic role in the six-party talks regarding
the North's nuclear programs has a historical lineage more than
400 years old.

By the same token, a number of China's most complex domestic
grievances are rooted in conquests made by Chinese rulers during the
17th and 18th centuries. From 1644 onward, the vast region of
Manchuria to China's northeast became part of the country's
central concept of its power. In 1683, the Qing emperor ordered naval
forces from Fujian province to oust renegade Chinese forces from
several islands off the country's southeastern coast. The
emperor's forces dispatched the rebels in a crisp campaign and, in
the process, added the fertile island of Taiwan to the growing orbit
of the Qing empire. Likewise, unrest on China's frontier led the
Qing dynasty to send military forces to Tibet around 1720, and
subsequently to incorporate border areas of north and eastern Tibet
into the Qing administrative structure, a process that was well
underway by the 1750s. It was also in the mid-18th century that Qing
expeditionary forces penetrated deep into the Altishahr regions of
Central Asia, and to Kashgar, Urumqi, and Ili, leading to Chinese
occupation of the vast, mainly Muslim regions of what is now called
Xinjiang.

Having gained these territories in the corners of the kingdom, China
has been loath to ever let them go. Even when the Qing dynasty fell in
1912, the Republican government, despite its fragility as an
administrative entity, sought to hold on to the fullest extent of the
empire. After their victory in 1949, the Communists did the
same. Today, Muslim unrest and Tibetan nationalism are near-constant
sources of tension for China's leadership. And Taiwan, lost first
to the Japanese in 1895, and then to the Chinese Nationalists in 1949,
is one of Asia's most dangerous potential flash points.

Although relations between China and the United States may be of vital
importance to both, from the Chinese perspective, the relationship has
been extremely brief. Indeed, there wasn't even a United States
for China to have relations with until late into the reign of the
Chinese Emperor Qianlong, arguably one of the greatest leaders of the
last Chinese dynasty. When relations were established, Americans
sometimes behaved admirably.

Other times, they were a nuisance, or worse, a menace. Again, it
depends who you are and where you settle your gaze. You can see the
United States as benevolent in its development of Chinese hospitals
and modern medicine. You can see it as destructive in its
dissemination of partisan religious tracts by American evangelists to
such people as the leader of the Taiping Rebellion. Or, you can see it
as thoroughly ambiguous in the 1900s, when U.S. leaders urged the
Chinese toward a more republican form of government, which quickly
descended into warlordism. To be sure, the Chinese have these images,
and many more, in mind when they think about their relations with the
United States.

These are the memories and the territorial histories that China has to
juggle as it embarks on its myriad new challenges and opportunities:
as the defender of an apparently irrelevant revolutionary ideology, as
a new kind of regional powerhouse, as the ambiguous heart of a global
diaspora, as one of the world's major new competitors for
shrinking supplies of fossil fuels, and as the present guardian of an
unprecedented amount of foreign exchange and investment. Some of these
phenomena can also be tracked through the historian's lens, but
some are, I believe, genuinely new. Just why that should be is itself
part of the story.

Jonathan D. Spence is Sterling professor of history at Yale
University.